A Novel Adaptive Feature Fusion Strategy for Image Retrieval

In the era of big data, it is challenging to efficiently retrieve the required images from the vast amount of data. Therefore, a content-based image retrieval system is an important research direction to address this problem. Furthermore, a multi-feature-based image retrieval system can compensate for the shortage of a single feature to a certain extent, which is essential for improving retrieval system performance. Feature selection and feature fusion strategies are critical in the study of multi-feature fusion image retrieval. This paper proposes a multi-feature fusion image retrieval strategy with adaptive features based on information entropy theory. Firstly, we extract the image features, construct the distance function to calculate the similarity using the information entropy proposed in this paper, and obtain the initial retrieval results. Then, we obtain the precision of single feature retrieval based on the correlation feedback as the retrieval trust and use the retrieval trust to select the effective features automatically. After that, we initialize the weights of selected features using the average weights, construct the probability transfer matrix, and use the PageRank algorithm to update the initialized feature weights to obtain the final weights. Finally, we calculate the comprehensive similarity based on the final weights and output the detection results. This has two advantages: (1) the proposed strategy uses multiple features for image retrieval, which has better performance and more substantial generalization than the retrieval strategy based on a single feature; (2) compared with the fixed-feature retrieval strategy, our method selects the best features for fusion in each query, which takes full advantages of each feature. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms other methods. In the datasets of Corel1k, UC Merced Land-Use, and RSSCN7, the top10 retrieval precision is 99.55%, 88.02%, and 88.28%, respectively. In the Holidays dataset, the mean average precision (mAP) was 92.46%.